


The Best Gift Ever

by MaisieBee



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Basically, Domestic Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 15:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15004118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaisieBee/pseuds/MaisieBee
Summary: Even with their hunting days behind them, Dean has had trouble adjusting to civilian life and sometimes fights with his husband, Cas, but he always apologizes. This time, he brings home a very special gift...





	The Best Gift Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Another story from 2014. Wow, I was on a roll back then!

Dean and Cas were having yet another argument.

Well, maybe that wasn’t quite the right word for it. Dean was the one doing most of the yelling. All of it in fact. Cas just sat there with his usually calm face on and waited for the steam to blow off. There was maybe about ten minutes left. He was repeating himself and losing the vim and vigor of the original statement, which was in its eloquent entirety: “Goddammit, Cas, where the hell have you been?!” 

Ten minutes. Then Dean would end up stomping off and hiding for the next few hours, as usual, then he would guiltily slink back into the house and not make eye-contact with anybody as he shoved some sort of present at Cas and drank a cup of black coffee.

Maybe he should have broken the news of his return more gently. But he hadn’t thought about that. He hadn’t realized three weeks had passed since he went to investigate the thing at the end of the garden. But he couldn’t tell Dean what he’d been hunting because the Winchester brothers were retired now, and Sammy’s house rule was that nobody was allowed to talk about hunting or monsters unless it was to reflect on a positive memory. That left over thirty years of life undiscussed and Dean was a bottler. He bottled his emotions and then one day they just come pouring out. Not without good reason, though. Dean was an excellent bottler.

So Cas sat there and watched as Dean ground his teeth and left the kitchen, slamming the screen door behind him. Suddenly, everything was quiet.

“Is Uncle Dean okay?” a small voice asked from behind him.

“Uncle Dean is fine, Robert,” Cas said reassuringly to the young teenage boy awkwardly leaning against the doorframe.

The boy opened his mouth to correct his uncle that his name was Bobby, not Robert, but decided against it. Robert was a gangly child of fifteen who had inherited both his father’s book wormy nature and his mother’s love of the outdoors, often seen sitting high up in trees with a book propped on his knees and a lollipop stick poking from the corner of his mouth. His hair was short and light brown, his eyes hazel, and freckles adorned his tanned face.

“Well, you were gone for three weeks. I would be pissy too if my husband was gone for that long,” an arrogant voice piped up as a girl slid around her brother into the kitchen.

“Don’t swear, M.J.,” Robert responded automatically. “Or you’ll have to pay me a quarter.”

M.J. stuck out her tongue. “Mary Jane, you fool. Mary Jane Winchester. I would appreciate if you would use the full name Mother blessed me with.” For all her big talk and long words, M.J. was small and willowy, even for an eleven-year-old. Her straight hair was carrot orange, which she prefered the call ‘fiery red’, her eyes the same hazel which she nicknamed ‘Sunlight Through A Glass of Whiskey’ for herself and ‘Boring yellowy-brown’ for her brother, and a pert, upturned nose which she was unusually proud of. Her bare feet slapping the tiled floor as she went to the refrigerator.

“Mary Jane Winchester, don’t swear,” both Cas and Robert said at the same time. Robert grinned at his uncle.

“Jinx,” he said.

Cas turned both blue eyes on him. “You can’t jinx me,” he said the way Dean had told him. “I’m an angelic being of the Lord and thus immune to jinxing.”

Robert and M.J. laughed to hard tears rolled down their cheeks. Robert was grinning even wider, his braces catching the bright summer sunshine. “Good one, Uncle Cas! I haven’t heard that one before.” He tried to imitate Cas’s naturally blank expression and failed; laughing harder.

Cas smiled a little. “Go outside and play like you’re supposed to at your age. The sunshine will increase your levels of vitamin d and—” 

M.J. rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, Uncle Cas. No need to go all sciency on us. Save that for your students.”

Robert caught his sister’s eye as she pulled the last lollipop from the plastic jar in the cabinet. She grinned mischievously.

He dove and tried to wrestle it from her hands, but M.J. slipped from his grasp and ran out the screen door, shrieking and laughing. Of course, they would end of breaking the lollipop with a rock and sharing the pieces. For all their teasing, Robert and M.J. were as close as Dean and Sam had been as kids — were still, Cas firmly reminded himself. But Cas watched them go with a pang of sadness. They didn’t know he was an angel but thought him a science teacher. They would never know of the countless adventures the three boys, now very much middle-aged men, had shared together. They would never know how Sammy and Dean had saved people, hunted things. How they had taken on the family business. How they had hated it.

But that aspect of their life was gone and buried with the corpses of those they had been too late to save.

So Cas stood and began to prepare dinner. For all his mechanical knowledge and bad-guy behavior, Dean knew how to cook. He taught Cas during the sleepless nights when nightmares wracked him until he was shaking and crying in his sleep. Those were the nights Cas held him even tighter and stroked his head. Now, Cas just hoped he would be back soon.

Dinner came and went. Sammy and his wife and their children laughed and talked and complemented Cas on his cooking skills. Cas packed up the leftovers and put them in the fridge where Dean would see them in case he snuck in without them knowing. 

Later that evening, Cas stood on the hill behind the house, The golden brown fields of Lawrence, Kansas spreading out for acres before him. The sunset was gorgeous. Oranges and pinks and yellows and blue. Robert and M.J. had dragged their uncle outside to see it while they set up their watercolor paint sets and tried to capture it. Cas just let the colors seep into his mind.

If he closed his eyes, he could still see it. It was dark outside now. Cas was sitting at the kitchen table again, reading from a book Dean had assured him was funnier in English. But just in case it wasn’t, Cas had a scrap of paper and a pencil, onto which he was translating passages into Enochian. 

His pencil tapped the page absently. He sketched a really bad, twisted tree on the corner of the page. Cas had never, in the history of his soul, been a good artist. It was just something he couldn’t do. His eyes just didn’t see the details and his hands refused to agree with what was pictured in his mind.

Cas had just flipped the book upside down to save his place when the screen door opened and Dean trudged in, eyes on the ground, and something across his shoulders like a yok. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be a labrador retriever puppy with a bandaged hind leg and a cone around it’s head.

The chair scraped back sharply as Cas stood, hands outstretched but totally unsure of what to do. Dean had a dog. On his shoulders. Cas sniffed but didn’t smell any alcohol. Unusual. Usually if he was gone for this long he was boozing at a local bar.

Dean eased the puppy carefully off himself and lay her gently on the floor. She whined in her sleep, but didn’t wake up. Dean crouched down next to her and stroked her head. “I found her in a ditch on the side of the road,” he said by way of hello. “She was in pretty bad shape. I guess it’s a good thing that I helped that whiney vet, Dr. Sharp, with a problem of his when I was still. . .” He blatantly didn’t say ‘hunting.’ “Anyway, he fixed her up and got rid of the fleas and cleaned her teeth. The anesthetic should wear off soon.” Dean stopped stroking the dog, but he didn’t look up. “I thought you and the kids would like her.”

Cas crouched next to Dean and looked into his face. “But you hate dogs.”

“I think I could probably live with this one. She seems. . . sweet,” Dean admitted.

Cas bent down to look into the dog’s face. Her eyes twitched and she sneezed. Cas wiped off his cheek. “Will you be my friend?” he asked her, but all she did was let out a sudden, very loud snore.

Dean laughed. “Let’s make her comfortable.” He took the dog in his arms and they went upstairs to their room. Cas rummaged around until he found an empty under-the-bed wicker basket, just big enough for the puppy, several cushions, and an old plaid shirt that he usually wore for room painting.

Cas tenderly placed the shirt over the dog. She snored even louder and seemed to settled comfortably into her drug-induced sleep.

“So, what are you going to name her?” Dean asked. He had his awkward posture: one arm crossing his body and holding onto his forearm, weight shifted to one hip, head tilted down in the guise of watching the sleeping dog.

“Name? Oh.” Cas thought. He suggested something.

“How about something less. . .guttural?” Dean said.

“Okay.” He thought. “What about Orlena? It’s a Latin name meaning ‘golden.’”

“Orlena,” Dean tried. The dog shifted in her sleep and whined. “Yeah, I like it.”


End file.
